


Like Father

by kkscatnip (autohaptic)



Category: The Eagle | The Eagle of the Ninth - All Media Types
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-10
Updated: 2016-06-10
Packaged: 2018-07-14 03:43:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7151675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/autohaptic/pseuds/kkscatnip
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At any rate, if Marcus is truly destined to martyr himself, all Esca has to do is stay alive until then.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like Father

"Put your weight on him, slave!" The surgeon growls, and Esca finds himself obeying the authority and need implicit in the tone before conscious thoughts enter into his head. As a Roman, of course, Marcus's injury and eventual death would only be an aftereffect of the disease and war he and his brethren brought with them.

Esca could allow him to flail; Esca could allow him to do himself in, and it would be no more than Marcus deserves. But now that he's committed to holding Marcus down, he finds himself looking to the man's eyes. 

They're greenish in the afternoon light, vague with fever but also too-bright and alive with a combination of pain and the refusal to surrender to the pain. It reminds Esca uncomfortably of his own refusal to submit.

He finds himself shamed, finds that he has to look away and bear down harder with his weight, for Marcus is well and truly a hulking monster of a Roman. 

When Esca looks back, Marcus's eyes are squeezed shut, teeth grinding while he grunts with pain. But he doesn't scream, he doesn't ask for a break, and Esca finds grudging respect for this idiot of a Roman growing in his chest.

Romans are no better than dogs, pissing on anything they want to simultaneously claim it and ruin it for others. It is not that he doesn't believe that this Roman will not do the same--did he not come from Rome to make war, to prove himself a barbarian?--but only that Esca thinks that with a certain type of handling, this Roman could be useful. 

Of course, that's only if he lives. Given the conversation Esca overheard between Aquila and the surgeon earlier, it's clear that neither of them expect Marcus to do anything more than die on the cross of his honor, just as his father before him. If he doesn't die of this wound.

Perhaps it makes Esca a fool to think Marcus might not be claimed by illness so easily, but he knows the story of Marcus's father's death, and he knows exactly how many Romans ran while Marcus's father fought til the end. 

At any rate, if he's truly destined to martyr himself, all Esca has to do is stay alive until then.

*

Esca's never been a true-dreamer, but he often knows when a dream is a dream, so when he finds himself holding Marcus down again, the grinding, grating sound of the surgeon going about his work just behind Esca's shoulder pressed to Marcus's chest, he knows it's not real.

It could be that knowledge that allows him to not deliver a firm punch to the Roman's stomach when Marcus's arm comes around him in the most--the most Roman of fashions, if Esca's going to be truly honest about it. If not for them, Esca's desire for and enjoyment of men wouldn't be half as shameful. 

He looks to Marcus's damnable face, as he did before, but there's no pained grimace, nothing but Marcus's other hand suddenly behind Esca's head, pulling him down for a kiss.

He has no true knowledge of what Marcus's lips feel like, but they have always looked as stony as the rest of his face, and Esca gasps to find them soft, pliable, to find Marcus huff a laugh and dig his fingers into Esca's clothes, pull Esca on top of him.

In the way of dreams, their clothes fall away. Thereafter it's only Marcus on the table, laid flat out, and Esca with a hand in the center of Marcus's chest, holding him down and delivering kisses as he sees fit. 

"Please," Marcus begs, and it is--the best kind of fantasy, the kind that will never happen, so Esca deigns to grind himself against Marcus's stomach, catches Marcus's hands in both of his and growls, "No, Roman. Watch me mark you, and enjoy it." 

Because it is a dream, Marcus does as Esca says, and Esca rewards him.

Esca wakes up tangled in the thin sheet that is all he sleeps with, a mess in his smallclothes and satisfaction curled in the back of his mind. 

It's nothing the Marcus of the waking world would ever allow, and furthermore, nothing Esca would give him outside of dreams. It's safe. 

Esca falls back to sleep, and for the first time since his capture, sleeps in.

*

Marcus doesn't die of shock from the surgery, nor the infection he contracts in the aftermath.

In hindsight, Esca should've expected it. If anyone would manage to scoff in the face of the gods and do as he pleased, it would surely be Marcus. 

But that doesn't mean Esca has to like it. Or Marcus, for that matter.

*

If not for the conversation overheard--the one where Aquila assured Marcus that Esca would kill him--maybe Esca would have been able to lower himself to betrayal. 

If not for the mixture of sincerity and contempt in his voice when he'd said Briton, Esca knows himself well enough to realize that knowing that Marcus was supposed to die, knowing how much Marcus wants to sacrifice himself for his precious eagle, it's possible that Esca might very well have lived up to the reputation of Aquila's cursed Britons.

And then again--Marcus's complete faith, Marcus's blind trust, Marcus just being--Marcus--

Esca is going to be the death of him. One way or another, he knows it, but after that conversation, there's no way he's going to allow it to be intentional. 

He spares himself a moment, as they ride away from Aquila's lands, to wonder how things might have been--could have been--if Marcus had been born a Briton.

But then Esca thinks of the Seal Prince and things which were. Further: things which could have been, and were decidedly not. 

It would be, at the very least, most troublesome for Esca if he were to have to at any point explain to a Roman Marcus falling on the sword of his honor north of Hadrian's Wall. 

*

It is well and truly astounding how blind Marcus is to any battle that is not soldiers in armor with swords. In the aftermath, Esca can think of nothing but the boy, who looked so much like Esca's brother-cousin that it is and was painful. 

Next time, don't hesitate.

Marcus thinks Esca weak, but he doesn't know that the tattoo on the boy's cheek is all that keeps Esca from being absolutely certain that in the years he's been gone, his brother-cousin must've had a son, and that son must be his spitting image.

And Esca, of all people, sworn to protect his kin, must have caused his death.

Esca cannot prevent himself from saying a prayer over the boy. The men, he helps Marcus to loot, helps Marcus to recognize what supplies they carry with his eternal Roman blindness to anything that is beyond his experience. The men Esca has no problem leaving where they lie, for their relatives to find and do proper rituals over in a few days when they fail to return from their hunting party.

The boy, despite Esca saying the prayer--twice--to release his soul, stays with Esca. Long past when he knows that he must've been found, along with the men, and rites performed and his soul sent to the afterlife where it won't be able to haunt the living.

It is then, perhaps, when Esca begins to feel true bitterness over Marcus's dogged refusal to die easily. 

*

Much like the dream about the surgeon's table, this dream takes place where they were yesterday: the camp site near the creek that ran dark red with iron where it spilled out of the mountains, the one that had the moss-covered rocks which made the most comfortable bed that Esca's slept on since leaving home. 

Only, this time it's not Marcus pulling Esca atop him; this time Esca has his hands on Marcus's ears, wrenching his head back while Esca drives into him. He puts into the strokes all the emotion he's kept such a careful check against over the days of riding and getting farther and farther from the wall and closer to home. 

Marcus takes it like a proper Roman, bless him. 

It's not unusual, in terms of Esca's sex dreams, but the unusual part is that directly before Esca means to come inside of Marcus, directly before he intends to claim Marcus's insides as thoroughly as he's claimed Marcus's outsides, he looks up because he hears a sound, like a hunting party approaching, and when he looks back down, he's now thrusting into Marcus's rotting corpse.

All at once, Esca wakes up, gasping and then swallowing convulsively against the bile rising in his throat. 

"What happens?" Marcus asks, waking up with his own shuddering gasp and grasping at Esca's cloak, at his shoulder. 

"Nothing," Esca tells him, just as gruffly as he should after that dream. 

But they are pressed together--the damp coldness has gotten into the blankets, this time of night, and anything else would be foolish given the Roman's thin southern blood--and Marcus can feel that it is not, precisely, nothing. But he is respectful--honorable, that goddamned honor--as ever, and merely lays back down, saying, "It's too cold to get up for that. Just roll over if you need to take care of it."

The idea of taking care of it, given how the dream ended, is no less than horrific. 

It's not that he truly wanted Marcus to die, now that he's gotten to know him. It's only that Marcus dying would've been a hell of a lot more convenient.

**Author's Note:**

> I think I sat down and wrote this all in one sitting after my second viewing of the movie and then promptly didn't look at it for six months. By the time I went back to it I wasn't sure where I had been going and wasn't able to re-capture the voice I had written with. It's a very enjoyable bit, though, and I've been told it almost stands on its own as a story.


End file.
